Assistant teacher course/Preparing and holding a lesson

—Democracy and Education, John Dewey

Preparing a lesson
While "preparing a lesson" is not an answer to the question in the above quotation it is an opportunity for creative group work, which can help to promote a spirit of community and a common purpose for the assistant teachers. Creative group work can have a positive impact on the learning motivation of the assistant teachers and on the resulting learning experience for their pupils, thus addressing a problem implied by the question.

A recommended handout is the first chapter of 700 Science Experiments for Everyone. The experiments from the Wikieducator collection "Biology in elementary schools" or lesson plans from TeachUNICEF can be used as examples for lesson plans. The pupils can go further and decide on roles for individual assistant teachers during the lesson. To stimulate the imagination of the participants for the following exercise the experiments shouldn't be too difficult, so the participants can focus on being creative and the experiments should allow to easily create a lesson with the potential to be entertaining for the audience. Entertaining topics (experiments) make this part of the task artificially easy here.

The participants may need basic advice on what assumptions can be made and how a lesson plan should be written during the following group work. At least one instructor should walk from group to group and offer advice. The instructor should only give advice on request, the participants are meant to be creative.

The participants haven't trained properly how to prepare a lesson but they have developed some ideas of their own about what can be done to prepare a lesson. The more important ideas should be presented by a representative of each group. The participants should be given a few minutes to select representatives and to nominate their best ideas.

The lesson plans should be gathered although the main benefit here was the experience and the presentation of "best practices". The lesson plans may be useful for the book project later on.

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Holding a lesson
For this unit an instructor should have read the teachers' handbook. The first step is to allow the pupils to phrase their own ideas again. The ideas should be more extensive and sophisticated as in the "Reinventing the wheel" phase.

In the following discussion the instructor can introduce some ideas from the teachers' handbook.

Assistant teachers should try to develop their own ideas for classroom management. To raise the hand is an ambiguous signal, especially when assistant teachers are involved. What signals should be distinguished and how? The participants should produce ideas, the instructor can help along when necessary.
 * For example:
 * An urgent request: Get up and raise hand
 * Reply to question: Raise hand with raised finger
 * Question of understanding: Raise hand with all fingers (the "highest priority")
 * Comment on the same topic: Raise hand with two fingers
 * Different topic: Raise hand with one finger and thumb out
 * Request help from assistant: Face assistant, raise hand at face level

What other signals may be important? The participants can also use colored cards as an alternative. When the group has decided on a system the system should be tried out in a classroom situation. The topic of the classroom situation can be the use of different signals when raising the hand, which allows to refine the system while testing it.

The participants are likely to develop a system too complex for application that needs to be revised and simplified, which is convenient because the assistant teachers will only know a revised and simplified system from their own experience, which means they can be creative in this task.

Literature

 * Big Book of Fun Science Experiments (Wikijunior, Wikibooks)